Webull Corporation

Good day and welcome to the Webull Corporation first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Carlos Questel, Head of Investor Relations for Webull. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to Webull's first quarter 2026 conference call. Earlier today, we issued a press release detailing our first quarter financial results. A copy of the release can be found on our IR website at webullcorp.com under the Investor Relations tab. Please note that this call is being recorded and will be available for replay via our IR website. During the call, we'll be making forward-looking statements about the company's performance and business outlook. These statements are based on how we see things today and contain elements of uncertainty. For additional information concerning the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to the cautionary statement and risk factors contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and press release, both of which can be accessed via our website. Today's presentation will include a discussion on adjusted operating expenses, adjusted operating profit, and adjusted net income, all non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparative gap measures are included in the press release that we issued today. It is important to note that although we believe that these non-gap measures provide useful information about our operating results, they should not be considered in isolation or construed as an alternative to their directly comparative gap measures. Furthermore, other companies may calculate similarly titled measures differently, limiting their usefulness as comparative measures to our data. We encourage our investors and others to review our financial information in its entirety and not rely on a single financial measure. With me today is our Group President and U.S. CEO, Anthony Denier, and our Group CFO, H.C. Wang. We will begin with prepared remarks and then take questions at the end. With that, I'd like to now turn it over to Anthony.

Thank you, Carlos, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Before I walk through our first quarter results, I want to step back and share how I think about the moment that our industry finds itself in and the direction it is heading. I believe we are living through a genuine inflection point in financial services. For the past decade, the defining competition in retail brokerage was fought on user interface. Who had the cleanest app, the most intuitive UI, the strongest brand? this healthy competition is certainly not over but a new channel has opened and we are at its beginning increasingly the question is not how a human interacts with a trading platform but how an ai agent does the interface of the future is not a screen on a smartphone It is an API, and the brokerage platform best positioned for the future is the one with the most complete, most reliable, and most developer-friendly execution and custody infrastructure. That is the platform we are deliberately building to position Webull as the industry leader. This is not a distant aspiration. It is informing decisions we are making today. in our API architecture, in our AI product roadmap, and in our B2B infrastructure design. And it is why I believe the results we're reporting today not only signal another strong quarter, but confirm that Weevil is executing on the right long-term strategy. Weevil's first quarter results represent a strong start to 2026, our second year as a public company. Revenue grew 36% year over year to 160 million. Customer assets reached 24 billion, up 90% year over year. And importantly, order flow from our institutional business, which we highlighted last year as a new area of growth, reached 9.5% of total platform equity volumes in the first quarter, a testament to the strength of our institutional product offerings. Since our listing just over a year ago, we have continued to execute on our ambitious plan to elevate, expand, and scale the business across three dimensions, enhancing the trading experience for active traders, expanding our global reach, and extending the platform into B2B and institutional markets. That execution has put us on a path of solid business growth and balance sheet strength, which is why we recently announced a share repurchase program of up to 100 million of our Class A ordinary shares. This program reflects our confidence in Webull's long-term value and our commitment to disciplined capital allocation. We are a company that invests for long-term growth and also returns capital to shareholders when appropriate. I am very proud of what the Webull team has achieved and extremely excited for what we plan to deliver to our customers and our shareholders. With that, let me now walk you through the highlights of this past quarter in more detail. Turning now to slide two to summarize our first quarter highlights. We recorded revenue of $159.9 million, up 36% year over year, driven by high trading volumes across all core asset classes. Customer assets decreased slightly from the beginning of the year to $24 billion due to market volatility, but still represent a 90% increase year over year. Equity notional volume increased by 104% year over year to 261 billion, and option volume rose by more than 31% to 159 million contracts. Our additional offerings, including futures, prediction markets, and crypto, all contributed to our growth this quarter. Futures in particular is seeing excellent growth. 84% on a year-over-year basis and 27% growth sequentially. That growth was driven by huge interest in commodities futures, especially oil futures, showcasing the breadth of our offerings and the variety of instruments we offer investors in times of geopolitical and market uncertainty. While we have now been public for over a year, we're still in an early and high conviction phase of our growth journey, and we will continue to aggressively invest in targeted opportunities that will power long-term growth. That investment is reflected in our adjusted operating expenses of $141.1 million, representing an increase of 64% on a year-over-year basis. We are not managing this business to increase short-term margins. We are building for long-term category leadership. Now turning to slide three and on our 2026 priorities. AI sits at the center of everything we are building. Our product roadmap this year reflects three distinct but reinforcing priorities. Deepening the experience for self-directed active traders expanding our global footprint, and building the infrastructure that powers our institutional and B2B platform. For active traders, we are rolling out three initiatives that materially expand the self-directed investment experience at Webull. First is Vega Analyst, which builds upon our industry-leading AI capabilities to revolutionize the research experience for self-directed active traders. For the first time in mere minutes, retail investors will have access to comprehensive, nuanced, and personalized research akin to sell-side research available to institutions. Subscribers to Vega Analysts can request research reports on any company at any time, enhancing their ability to make informed real-time decisions. We're currently beta testing this new feature with a select group of customers, but look forward to rolling it out across the US and globally in 2026. The second initiative is Portfolio Blueprint, which enables one-click portfolio construction and execution, including copy trading. Portfolio Blueprint will give active traders the ability to act on conviction with the speed and sophistication our platform is known for. Lastly, later this year, we plan to add AI portfolio, enabling agentic portfolio construction and trading for our customers, bringing the power of AI-driven decision-making directly into the hands of active investors. The SEC's elimination of the pattern day trader rule is a structural tailwind for everything we are building for our active traders. When the rule becomes effective on June 4th, Webull will be ready to support our customers on day one. Our engineering team moved quickly to update our systems and implement the rule change ahead of the effective date, demonstrating the agility and technical capability that distinguishes Webull from legacy brokers. every weevil customer that qualifies for intraday margin will be able to place unlimited day trades from the moment the rule change takes effect with the full benefit of our zero commission model and product depth behind them on international expansion expanding global access remains a key pillar of our growth strategy and we've taken some truly exciting steps in the first quarter We received permission to operate in 22 additional markets in the European Economic Area during Q1 and are now approved to expand across all of Europe. Currently, we operate in 15 total markets and have expanded our zero commission offerings to seven markets beyond the United States, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico. We recently launched operations in Germany and we'll continue our rollout into additional European markets through the year. In APAC, our customer assets have grown to 4 billion and we now have over 790,000 funded accounts outside the US. Our ability to export the US retail trading experience at scale thanks to our global infrastructure, compliance capabilities, and product depth, remains a genuine competitive differentiator. For our institutional and B2B platform, this quarter, we received approval for our US self-clearing license, a significant step for our B2B business and the evolution of our platform. This gives us the ability to clear trades and custody securities entirely in-house, strengthening the operational backbone of our B2B business and creating meaningful synergies and operating leverage as the institutional business scales. On the technology front, we recently released our MCP server, enabling AI agents to interact with Webull's platform natively. positioning Webull as a preferred execution and custody layer in the emerging agentic stack. As AI-driven investing becomes mainstream, we believe broker infrastructure quality will be as important a competitive differentiator as user experience is today, and we are investing accordingly. Institutional flow accounted for 9.5% of our equity notional volume during Q1, reflecting meaningful traction in a business we are in the early stages of scaling. In Australia, we launched Weevil Connect, a tech-enabled portfolio management and execution platform purpose-filled for financial advisors. In Hong Kong, we launched TrustLink, a system designed specifically for trustees, enabling them to manage segregated investment portfolios for individual trust clients. Together, these launches reflect our commitment to building B2B infrastructure that serves the full spectrum of professional and institutional clients across our key markets. On slide four, I'll discuss our continued user and funded account growth. Our investments in marketing continue to drive adoption, and during the first quarter, we added approximately 800,000 registered users. Over the past year, we added more than 3 million registered users, a 15% increase compared to the first quarter of 2025, and bringing the platform to a total of 27.6 million registered users. You may know, Weevil originated as a global market data platform before evolving to become the leading digital investment platform we are today. As a result, we have a considerable number of registered users that still take advantage of our data offerings in countries where our trading platform is not yet available. We are committed to providing access to best-in-class market data and information to all users, irrespective of geography and their ability to invest on the platform. On the right side of the slide, you can see funded account metrics. Funded accounts, defined as accounts where customers have made an initial deposit and the balance has remained above zero for 45 consecutive calendar days as of the record date, showed steady growth. We added approximately 80,000 new funded accounts this quarter, bringing the total number to 5.11 million. an 8% year-over-year increase. As we continue to innovate and enhance our offerings, we're also happy to report that our quarterly retention rate was at a record high at 98.4%. Turning now to slide five, customer assets increased by over 90% on a year-over-year basis to 24 billion, and customer net deposits in the quarter were 2.1 billion. also up over 90% year over year. Sequentially, both metrics declined, reflecting a challenging macro backdrop in Q1 as a software sector sell-off and escalating geopolitical tensions drove equity market volatility, while rising energy prices and inflation concerns weighed on investor sentiment. This was an industry-wide dynamic. What the numbers demonstrate, however, is that our customers remain engaged and continue to make meaningful deposits into the Webull platform during the quarter, a testament to the trust they place in us. On slide six, you will find trading volumes for the quarter. We continue to see growth in prediction markets and crypto, but equities and options trading remain at the heart of our business, and equity and option volumes continue to increase. In the first quarter, equity notional volume surpassed $261 billion, up 104% year-over-year and up 9.2% sequentially. Options contract volume totaled 159 million contracts for this quarter, up 31% year-over-year and up 3.2% sequentially. These results reflect an all-time high for Webull. and highlight our commitment to providing the first choice platform for active traders, both here in the U.S. and increasingly globally. Our user base trades consistently across all assets, reflecting a grounded approach fueled by discipline and forward-looking commitment rather than short-term gain and momentum-chasing behavior. With that, I'll pass the call over to HC for a closer look at our financial results for the quarter.